© 2007 UC Regents Buy this book University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2007 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Solnit, Rebecca. Storming the gates of paradise : landscapes for politics / Rebecca Solnit. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn: 978-0-520-25109-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Political ecology—United States. 2. Human ecology—United States. 3. Landscape assessment—United States. 4. United States— Politics and government. I. Title. JA75.8.S65 2007 304.20973—dc22 2006035367 Manufactured in the United States of America 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 10987654321 This book is printed on New Leaf EcoBook 50, a 100% recycled fiber of which 50% is de-inked post-consumer waste, processed chlorine-free. EcoBook 50 is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/ASTM D5634–01 (Permanence of Paper). Contents List of Photographs xi Introduction: Prisons and Paradises 1 1 UNEVEN TERRAIN: The West The Red Lands 15 The Postmodern Old West, or The Precession of Cowboys and Indians 22 The Struggle of Dawning Intelligence: Creating, Revising, and Recognizing Native American Monuments 40 The Garden of Merging Paths 51 2 BORDERS AND CROSSERS A Route in the Shape of a Question 69 Thirty-Nine Steps Across the Border and Back 75 Nonconforming Uses: Teddy Cruz on Both Sides of the Border 97 3 TROUBLE BELOW: Mining, Water, and Nuclear Waste The Price of Gold, the Value of Water 115 Meanwhile Back at the Ranch 128 Poison Pictures 135 4 REACHING FOR THE SKY Excavating the Sky 143 Drawing the Constellations 165 Hugging the Shadows 168 Justice by Moonlight 172 5 LANDSCAPES OF RESISTANCE AND REPRESSION Fragments of the Future: The FTAA in Miami 179 Jailbirds I Have Loved 188 Making It Home: Travels outside the Fear Economy 195 Mirror in the Street 199 Liberation Conspiracies 203 Sontag and Tsunami 216 6 GARDENS AND WILDERNESSES Every Corner Is Alive: Eliot Porter as an Environmentalist and an Artist 225 The Botanical Circus, or Adventures in American Gardening 254 A Murder of Ravens: On Globalized Species 265 7 WOMEN’S PLACE Tangled Banks and Clear-Cut Examples 275 Seven Stepping Stones down the Primrose Path: A Talk at a Conference on Landscape and Gender 282 Other Daughters, Other American Revolutions 297 8 INFERNAL MUSEUMS California Comedy, or Surfing with Dante 307 The Wal-Mart Biennale 318 The Silence of the Lambswool Cardigans 323 Locked Horns 327 9 CITY AT THE END OF THE WORLD The Orbits of Earthly Bodies 333 San Francisco: The Metamorphosis 337 The Heart of the City 345 The Ruins of Memory 351 Gaping Questions 371 CODA: The Pacific Seashell to Ear 379 Acknowledgments 385 Notes 387 Permissions 407 Index 413 1 UNEVEN TERRAIN The West The Red Lands [2003] The West began at the pay phone at the gas station in Lee Vining, the little town next to Mono Lake on the east side of the Sierra Nevada, too remote for cell phones. I was standing around in the harsh golden light at seven thousand feet waiting to make a call when I realized that the man on the line was trying to patch up his marriage, and the task wasn’t going to be quick or easy. “You just aren’t going to let us get back together, are you?” he said in a tone at once supplicating and truculent. I thought that maybe she had her reasons and wondered how far away she was on the other end of the phone line. At Lee Vining, named after a miner and Indian killer, the rain shadow begins: the Sierra, which are just a hair shorter than the Alps, scrape off the Pacific clouds and keep everything east of them arid. There are few real boundaries in nature, and this is one of the most astounding: from the west, you can hike up a green mountain slope and come to the divide, where you face the beginning of a thou- sand miles or more of desert, stand in patches of deep snow from the winter before, and look at a terrain where only a few inches of moisture a year arrive. In most of California, all water flows west to the Pacific, including that of the west- ern slope of the Sierra; but on the Sierra’s other side, it goes east, into salty bodies of water like Mono and Pyramid lakes, into sinks and subterranean spaces, into thin air. The Great Basin, so-called because its scanty water doesn’t drain to any sea, is mostly a terrain of north-south-running ranges, sharp-edged raw geology, separated by flat expanses of sagebrush. In the desert, plants grow farther apart to accommodate the huge root systems 15 they need to collect enough water to live, and so do communities and ranches. Few but the desert’s original inhabitants found it beautiful before cars. The extremes of heat and cold, the vast scale, and the scarcity of water must have been terrifying to those traversing it by beast or on foot. On a hot day, water is sucked straight out of your skin, and you can feel how fast dying of thirst could be; but this aridity is what makes the air so clear, what opens up those fifty-mile views. What feeds the soul starves the skin. Now, with air conditioning and interstates and the option of going several hundred miles a day with ease, desert austerity is a welcome respite from the overdeveloped world. The aridity and the altitude—the lowlands are mostly more than four thousand feet high—make the light strong, clear, and pow- erful; and the sky in these wide places seems to start at your ankles. Because wild creatures too are spread far apart and often operate at night, because the colors and changes of the plant life can be subtle, it often seems as though the real drama is in the sky—not exactly life, but life-giving, the light and the rain. Summer thunderstorms in the arid lands are an operatic drama, particu- larly in New Mexico, where the plot normally unfolds pretty much the same way every day during the summer monsoon season: clear morning skies are gradually overtaken by cumulus clouds as scattered and innocuous as a flock of grazing sheep, until they gather and turn dark; then the afternoon storm breaks, with lightning, with thunder, with crashing rain that can turn a dusty road into a neck- lace of puddles reflecting the turbulent sky. New Mexico is besieged now by a horrendous multiyear drought, and, watching the clouds gather every afternoon as if for this dionysian release that never came, I felt for the first time something of that beseeching powerlessness of those who prayed to an angry, unpredictable God and felt how easy it would be to identify that God with the glorious, fickle, implacable desert sky. Every summer I go to live in the sky, I drive into this vastness whose lumi- nousness, whose emptiness, whose violence seem to give this country its identity, even though few of us live there. It’s hard to convey the scale of the empty quar- ter. The Nevada Test Site, where the United States and the United Kingdom have detonated more than a thousand nuclear bombs over the past half century, is inside a virtually unpopulated airbase the size of Wales. Nevada is about the size 16 UNEVEN TERRAIN: THE WEST of Germany and has a population of a million and a half, which wouldn’t sound so stark if it weren’t that more than a million of them live in Las Vegas and most of the rest in the Reno area, leaving the remainder of the state remarkably unpopu- lated. At one point, the state decided to capitalize on this and named Highway 50, which traverses the center of Nevada, “the loneliest highway in America.” From Mono Lake, I drove about forty miles on 120, crossing from California to Nevada at some point along the way; then a stretch along the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, Route 6, over to the small town of Basalt; and another hundred or so miles up to 50. At first, the country was high enough that it was green, beautiful, stark, and treeless. Then the altitude climbed a little into piñon pine and juniper country, before dropping down into the drabness of most of the Great Basin, the color of sagebrush and the dirt in between. A grove of trees is a sure sign of a ranch house and irrigation, though there are entire valleys—and a valley means a place five or ten miles wide and several times as long—in which no such ranch is to be seen. Highway 50 traverses a dozen of these valleys and passes; driven in a day, they pass like musical variations, with their subtle differences of color and form. One range looked like mountains, another more like cliffs, with tilted layers of strata clearly visible. One valley was full of dust devils, those knots of swirling wind that pick up debris and move it across the land, funnels that are the visible sign of the wind’s entanglement in itself.